This sculpt is 20 milion polygons. I stopped myself from over detailing leather, at least this time. Rendered in Zbrush with best render. Grey is basic material (dual shade) and orange is my own matcap. Some curves modifications in Photoshop.

Update: Decided to texture it. Since it will never end up anywhere other than my portfolio I decided to go quick decimate/zremesh route + uv master. So while mesh and uvs aren’t pretty they get the job done, at least for the purpose of this presentation. So final mesh is few hundred thousand triangles and few textures 2k/4k. Textured in photoshop + some polypaint. Screengrab from Toolbag 2. Few different lighting conditions hence slight color difference between each view.

Dynamesh sculpture that is sitting comfortably at 14 million polygons. I was sculpting it little by little over a course of a year or so. It changed quite a few times. Downside of not having a concept and doing things on the run. During that time even my sculpting technique changed as I switched to different brushes. Rendered with best render in Zbrush with one of my many personal matcaps plus a little bit of curve editing in Photoshop.

Three real-time characters rendered in Toolbag 2. Well, kinda realtime. Those are lazy mode. Basically I polypainted them in Zbrush and then remeshed/decimated them to few hundred thousand triangles. Even the UVs were automatic. I generated normal maps, touched up the textures in Photoshop. By touch up I mean slap some rock texture over them, add a fabric pattern etc. The actual painting was done in Zbrush. The idea was to give these sculpts some color without having to deal with all the technical stuff.

Now the head is 18 million polygons and the other two are rather low, 4 million quads or so. The unfortunate effect of that low polygon count is that I had to add generic noise as detail normal map on top of them because stuff was simply too blurry. Multiple textures were generated, no time for packing it on a single texture sheet. Still I must say I am rather pleased with the state of real-time rendering these days. Instant is more fun.

One of those models as you can see is couple of years old. Actually all of them are (at least partially), its just that they were never posted online.

This 3d graphic model was started somewhere in the era of Zbrush 3.5. Initially it was sci-fi but I changed the design somewhere along the way. It is around 20 milion polygons. Entire model is basicly brush work except for fabric and bag high detail pattern that were done with noise. I didn’t bother creating any alpha maps. Not the most efficient way to be honest but it is a good practice.

This one started as a quick head model. Unfortunately I could not stop myself from adding more stuff and this is where I landed. I actually thought of doing whole scene with it but nah. Performance is already pretty bad.

Wrinkly face number billion and one. I had that model on my hdd for a while, I probably would not finish it, if not for already sculpted eagle’s head. I sometimes do that when I don’t want some cool model to waste. That hard surface eagle was sculpted by hand from sphere.

Even though I finished this one in 2011, I started this 3d model several years earlier. However back then, I didn’t have the necessary skills to do it properly so I shelved it. I think I started it in Zbrush 2. So around couple years ago I found it on my hard drive. I liked the design and decided to re-do it. Besides general idea, most of it was designed on the fly and done from very primitive base meshes. That is why there is some stretching here and there. Now I didn’t model it for 2 years of course. I simply returned to it from time to time, did some part and moved on. Rendered in Zbrush with BPR.

This 3d character was started probably around 2008-2009 without much thought behind it. I had some old upper body very basic mesh and decided to sculpt some fat as I don’t think I did that before. Anyway I gradually added stuff from time to time before deciding what the character is supposed to be at the end. That model never was supposed to be render material. Hence a lot of things that are sculpted from basically a box with few extrusions. Some stretching is caused by that. It was just a random model that accidentally ended up being rendered.

As usual, base mesh in Silo, sculpt in Zbrush 3.5 (maybe 3.1). Grey models are rendered in 4.0 with best preview render. Textures were done in Photoshop and final image was rendered in XSI with Mental Ray. It took 10 hours or so. Also there is a lot of post processing here. A lot of color correction and so on. For example depth of field is done in post. Back then I learned about linear rendering workflow.

Year 2009, rendered in 3delight (renderman) + Softimage XSI with no GI and no decent shaders. I think I used phong/blinn. Anyway, a ton of displacements. For example this is how the hats fuzz is achieved. Insane amount of polygons everywhere. Hat was done with old school box modeling. I learned the power of post effects in CGI with this render.

2009 normal mapped character. 8528 triangles and 2048×2048 with color/spec/gloss textures. Highres model is 8,5 million more or less. Render is 5 point lights and single phong shader. There is slight red overlay on skin to emulate SSS. Spec map is colored because reasons.

Old 2003/2004 LOW POLY MODELS. Still some of them look decent. Besides this is old school diffuse only texturing that is gone forever. I am not going to create anymore of these, ever. Fun times. You could modify mesh or UV mapping whenever you felt like without having to worry about some silly normal maps. Also it was a lot faster to finish character back then.

Additionally some classic 2d textures. All the final effect of character was mostly based on Photoshop work.